It’s illegal to fish the Salmon River directly behind the state-owned fish hatchery in Oswego County.

But one weekend a year, a dozen disabled military veterans and their fishing guides spend two days in the pristine water, casting their fly lines to steelhead trout — wily fish that make you work hard to land them.

Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing, a national nonprofit organization that teaches disabled veterans to fish and tie flies, organized the fishing expedition for retired soldiers from around the region.

Sunday morning, Nathan Haddad, 32, hooked a relentless one. His fishing guide, Dave Williams, held on to the back of his waders as the two men trudged more than 100 yards in the river to reel the fish in. At one point, it jumped out of the water.

The stillness broke: “Get him! Wow, that’s a big one!” A few of the anglers left their spots to watch Haddad chase the fish. And they took a few good natured jabs, too, as he and Williams continued to trudge through the cold water while misty cold rain bit at them.

Finally, Haddad, a retired Army staff sergeant who served at Fort Drum, got the fish in close enough and they pulled it out by its tail. He held the head and the tail for someone else to take a picture. But the fish wasn’t the picture. It was Haddad’s face — stretched by a smile that seemed almost too big.

The eight-pounder was his first steelhead. Certainly it wasn’t the hardest combat for the man who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and counts his injuries like this: “stabbed twice, shot once, blown up four times.”

“When a soldier gets hurt, they think part of them is dead,” Haddad said, still standing in the water. “To get outdoors and land an eight-pound steelhead in rushing water, that’s a win.”

The fishing expedition was strictly catch, take a picture, and release.

Dan Morgan, who runs the Syracuse chapter of Project Healing Waters and manages social media for the national organization, meets with disabled vets at the Syracuse VA Medical Center every week. He and other anglers teach them how to cast in an auditorium. And they teach them how to tie flies.

In fly fishing, the lures are colorful feathery things that the fishermen often make themselves. It’s a quiet and difficult task that helps with hand-eye coordination for people with brain injuries. And it helps with forgetting war for a little while.

Michael Rist, 41, caught his first steelhead this weekend, too, in the Salmon River. Rist also is part of the Fort Drum chapter of Project Healing Waters. He had been in the Army for 17 years and was a sergeant first class when he was injured.

Learning to fish and tie flies gave him a small window out of a bad place, he said. To get outside where there’s cold water and nature all around is a healing thing, even if you just sit on the bank and watch, he said. “It calms you down,” Rist said.

But he wasn’t watching when he reeled in that steelhead.

“I probably had a smile that connected to the back of my neck,” Rist said, smiling again as he told of catching the evasive fish. “To hold it and see it and have someone take a picture of it, I needed it.”